HIPAA Center by Paubox: Summer Solstice Edition

HIPAA Center is designed to give you a quick glance into the Top 5 newsworthy moments that we saw happen in the HIPAA industry this month.

In this June installation of HIPAA Center by Paubox, we kick off the first day of summer at beautiful Baker Beach in San Francisco with a special guest. But news of HIPAA violations is one summer bummer…

Without further ado, here are the top 5 HIPAA moments from the month of June.

1. What We Know About HIPAA Under Trump’s Administration

Here’s what we know about HIPAA under Trump’s Administration so far.

During his first 100 days in office, Trump has implemented five HIPAA enforcement actions – totaling $11,631,000 in HIPAA violation fees.

Trump also released a proposed fiscal 2018 budget that has huge budget cuts to the Office of National Coordinator for Health IT (ONC) and the Office for Civil Rights (OCR), making it harder for the OCR to enforce HIPAA violations with limited resources.

A former Beacon Health System employee has been discovered to have accessed the medical records of approximately 1,200 patients without authorization over a period of three years.

The privacy breach was uncovered during a routine audit of ePHI access logs, with the unauthorized access discovered on March 30, 2017.

The employee in question was permitted to access patient records to perform work duties, although access rights were abused and the records of other patients were viewed even though there was no legitimate work reason for doing so.

An audit by Beacon Health discovered the unwarranted access of patient information, which occurred from March 2014 to March 2017.